I've been playing the game for a couple days now and everything looked fine, but yesterday I alt-tabbed out of the game and when I came back everything was bright and washed out. I've tried messing with the settings, restarting the computer, etc. but nothing fixes it. I also tried to start a new game but the problem is still there. Does anyone know how to fix this?
Have you tried adjusting the brightness on the monitor itself, not the computer? I change the brightness on my monitor for different games (caeser, civ, hearts of iron etc...)
Could be a graphics card issue? Isn't there a brightness problem with cards that auto manage anti-aliasing or something? check the common issues and solutions stickied thread, I'm fairly sure there's a post about that problem.
I also had problems when using alt + tab with TOEE. I don't recomment switching between games and other things at all. Especially not on a weak computer like mine.
And, remember, state of the art video cards that are superior and more powerful advanced video cards are not always better for playing ToEE [most often true for nVidia cards, seldom often true for Radeon cards]. Plus sometimes, for playing ToEE, it is better not to optimize the video settings for a newer or more modern video card.
Modern cards are *heavily* optimized for 3D ! That means that a game still working with sheer bitmaps to a huge part becomes incredibly slow ... This is for example well-known among the "mappers" and the community of the game "Cultures", which uses almost no 3D, except the figures and the buildings. (Example : English site for Cultures 2 It's a bit like the Settlers 3 or 4.)